1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to high availability computer systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing computer failover to a virtualized environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computer systems require high availability of the computer services provided to clients. Such high availability systems generally provide a cluster of servers (nodes) that redundantly operate to facilitate replacing a failed server with another server to provide seamless computer services to users. The transition of services from a failed server to another server is known as failover. Alternately, if service itself faults, with or without a hardware failure, the service needs to be transitioned to another server as a failover. In order to increase availability of services, computer systems deploy one or more redundant servers that can execute applications (or provide resources) running on other cluster nodes in the cluster whenever a server or application faults. This is traditionally described as an N+1 failover configuration. However, at any point in time, if two or more servers fault and the standby server begins executing those applications, there is a chance that an errant application may interfere with other application space and cause a failure of all applications executing on the standby server. Consequently, the cluster no longer provides services with high availability.
Therefore, there's a need in the art for improved failover processing within computer systems.